“This handsome man from the twentieth

Ignoring his old age and wounds

Is still ready to ride us endlessly”

B. Okudzhava “Song about the Moscow Tram”

Moscow tram turns 120 years old this year. In 1899, the first route from Brest train station (now Belorussian) towards Butyr...

We want to present some facts about Moscow which we, ourselves, find exciting and often contrary to the popular beliefs. 

1. Red square has nothing to do with the Red army or Kremlin walls red color. In fact, Kremlin used to be of white color at the time when the square...

In the beginning of 20th century the population of Moscow was around 1.5 million people, in the below image you can see what portion of todays’ Moscow territory it took. Nowadays the population is around 15 milion, 10 times growth in one century. Let’s look at the keys...

In this post we would like to make a quick introduction to some traditional Russian toys apart from the well-known matryoshka, which you might also purchase as a souvenir. 

Dymkovo ceramic toys

These colourful ceramic toys are known since 15-16th century. Their productio...

We would like to recommend you a wonderful website which will bring you the image of old Moscow: https://pastvu.com/

The beauty of this resource is that you can choose a specific point and see how it looked 50 or 100 years ago.

For example, I was amazed to see that the p...

Now, we'd like to tell you about another walk we recently took with Olga and my family at Chistye Prudy (“Clean Ponds”) area.

You probably have already walked near the Clean Ponds, since this is a popular gathering and walking place in Moscow. And you probably know that...

Following our last note on seven Stalin's skyscrapers, we would like to tell you briefly about Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky, the co-author of the last 7th skyscraper "Ukraina" hotel and a man of very unusual fate. The fate that included an orphanage, study at Viennese Arts...

We have just celebrated Moscow 870th anniversary. And because of this, we would like to recollect the story of 800th Moscow anniversary.

In 1947 Stalin ordered to create 8 skyscrapers to celebrate Moscow's 800th anniversary. 7 of them have been accomplished and now are...

Last Sunday we took advantage of the surprisingly good weather and walked through Baumanskaya region with Olga. In fact, before 1920th the place has been called "German settlement" and for centuries has been the foreigners quarter in Moscow.

Luckily, it's not as much de...